


revenge is sweet(bitter)

by ashen_key



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Comment Fic, Gen, Morally Ambiguous Character, Murder, Pre-Canon, Prompt Fic, Revenge, Unreliable Narrator, non-archive warning in note
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-20
Updated: 2012-08-20
Packaged: 2017-11-12 13:06:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/491349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashen_key/pseuds/ashen_key
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To some people, revenge is neither sweet nor bitter. </p><p>It's just simply the right thing to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	revenge is sweet(bitter)

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Месть сладка (горька)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/497679) by [Helga Winter (hwinter)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hwinter/pseuds/Helga%20Winter)



> CONTAINS: a non-violent murder committed in an intimate, sexulized setting. 
> 
> Written for the [Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff Promptation](http://be-compromised.livejournal.com/60569.html), for the prompt, _revenge is a kiss and this time I won't miss._ Clint's backstory was originally the brainchild of [TLvop](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TLvop), I've just stolen with permission.

When her client( _target_ ) opens the hotel room door, she steps in with a smile, kisses his cheek, and says, “Call me Teresa, darling.” It's not her real name, of course, but that is an accepted part of the game that her target thinks he is playing. 

(She's playing another game, where names are revealed at either carefully chosen intervals, or not at all)

“The money is on the table,” he says, perfectly comfortable with the situation as he sees it. He – a man in his fifties, confident with himself and his life – has done this before. 

“Well, thank you,” she says, only turning to get it once he has started walking towards the bed. His back is turned; he never sees her palm the needle in her handbag. 

He is sitting on the bed and she slides close, straddles his lap. She's removed her blouse, and her bra is black, pushes up her already generous breasts. It's a distraction. His hands slide up her stockinged thighs, up past her elastic garters and underneath her skirt, and he says, “Well, aren't you just the prettiest thing?”

“To die for,” she says, her voice husky with a smile in it. 

Then Natasha stabs him in the neck with the needle.

She shoves him back against the bed so he can't move while the drug takes effect. When his hands fall, she smiles brighter, and stays peering down at him. 

He can't move, he can't breathe. He is a dead man.

But not yet. For the moment, he is only dying, and so he can listen. 

“You wanted a Red Room girl, Kaufmann?” she asks him, and she's smiling. “Another butterfly to your collection of criminals? And then Nadezhda Zharkova killed herself rather than let you and those other idiots arrest her. And her little girls. You know why she did that?”

Natasha bends down, whispers in his ear. “You know why. You wanted to bag a Red Room girl, and so you threatened my sister with sending her and her daughters back to there. You know what we survived, and instead of doing anything about it, you used it as a threat against her and those beautiful little girls. Because you know how much it scares even us. 

So, Kaufmann, you are going to die. And you won't be the only one.”

Rolling off him, Natasha doesn't even look at the dying man. She out of her large handbag she pulls a flimsy summer dress, and pulls it on. It covers her short skirt, and starts the shift in her appearance. She slips her blouse on over the dress (but doesn't button it), and takes off her blonde wig. Unpinning her red braid, she tugs her hair loose, and then adds a necklace. Glancing around, she sees Kaufmann's jacket, and smiles as she picks it up.

“Thank you,” she tells him, slipping it on. There. From the businesswoman she'd walked in as, she now looks like a student careless with mama and papa's money. 

Perfect. 

Natasha double-checks he is dead, and then shuts the door behind her. Down the elevator, out through the foyer, and once she's in the street and a block away, she takes out her cell-phone and dials. 

“It's me,” she says, switching from German to Italian.

“And it's me, too,” says her other sister Olya. “It's done?”

“Yes, yes, went down fine. Yours?”

“Made him _crawl_ ,” Olya says, her laugh smug. Olya the sniper; Natasha can imagine how she made the detective crawl. Made him afraid before a final bullet to end him. 

She smiles. 

“Good.”

– – 

Clint allows himself a drink, because it's been a shit day in a shit week at the tail-end of an operation that he's been quietly hating for months now. It's been nearly two years of cleaning up the world of contract-killers, and he is _tired_. 

He allows himself one drink, because two will turn into too many. 

“She waited until everyone was at the crime-scene,” says Agent Waechter. She's Interpol, pretty competent, currently probably suffering from delayed shock. She also has his work number and was the one to get him on this particular case. A case that happened to involved _two_ ex-Red Roomers, one of whom he was going to go after anyway. 

He hates the Red Room cases. 

“She waited, and then she shot someone else.”

“Sniper,” he says, and swallows his drink. “We're patient.” 

“The victim,” says Waechter, “had been _on probation_ when the Zharkova fuck-up went down.”

“So, Usp...So, _Olga_ , is getting out of control. I'll eliminate her.”

He is going to work out how to say her last name. He knows how to spell it now – Uspenskaya – and he is going to be able to say at least once before he shoots her.

The Red Room's daughters get to him, and always fucking have since the first one. 

“When?”

“When,” Clint says, and he can hear the strain of keeping his voice even, “I know where she is. And when I know where Romanova is at the same time. I can't get Olga if I can't get to Romanova before she knows, and vice fucking versa. Because really? I don't want _either_ of them coming after my team.” 

“Uspenskaya has directly killed ten people in the past two years, all either Interpol or the local police, and Romanova helped her. I'm not even counting the other fatalities from that five car pile-up Uspenskaya caused.” Waechter's voice is calm, yet strangled around the edges. 

Clint finishes his drink. “Then the local police and Interpol should have thought about that before driving their sister to kill her kids and then shoot herself. I'm going to bed,” he adds, and walks away from the hotel bar before he says something else more unprofessional. 

He knows what Uspenskaya and Romanova did. The first two, Kaufmann and Seiler, they had been responsible, and so they had to die. One by three bullets, the other by drug-induced-asphyxiation, both methods reflecting the different M. O.s of the two assassins. 

Clint could – and did – respect their logic. He'd be a hypocrite of the worst order if he didn't. 

He falls back against his bed, and scrubs his face with a groan. 

First people he ever killed; a bunch of stupid kids who had hit his boyfriend in a drive-by shooting, sent him crumpling to the ground in an awful parody of his normal stage bow. They hadn't even aiming for him; Ramón had simply been in the wrong place in the wrong time. 

Clint had hunted them down, and killed them. 

And then Ramón had stared at him in horror, and Clint ended up running off to the Army as soon as the circus reached the States again because both of them had been unable to handle it, and his act of vengeance had set him on the path to SHIELD and here.

 _Here_ , in this three-star hotel room, on the hunt for two young women who had committed their own acts of vengeance. _Are_ committing, in Uspenskaya's case, and he disapproves of the amount of collateral she is collecting. 

That aside, he knows without asking that they won't regret it. Regret how things turned out, maybe, regret that it probably won't bring much (if any) peace, but not the act itself. To some people, revenge is neither sweet nor bitter. 

It's just simply the right thing to do. 

(He really should have taken at least one more drink.)


End file.
